SciFi Romance Brigade Blog Hop

Today, I
thought I’d give you a little taste of Dreamclock, the second book in the
Darkwalk series and my newest release. The series is a dystopian scifi with
just a hint of romance, set in a world where Darkwalk, a shadowy secret
government agency, has genetically engineered supersoldiers called
Darklings. Although the Darklings
have wrested control of the organization for themselves, they still have to
contend with their past.

In the scene
below, our heroine, Wraith, is exploring the government facility where they
were genetically engineered, with her team: Rogue, Sin, Prime, Nadia, and
Slayer.

Without further
ado, here’s the excerpt:

The instant the
elevator doors opened on level seven, Wraith knew they had found what they were
looking for. The elevator alcove was an airlock.

A memory of
sneaking through the nighttime halls slammed into her, the airlock they had
found. The excitement and fear balanced equally, the curiosity and training
that had made them bold enough to risk it. Beyond the airlock had been labs, and in the labs they had
seen… What?

Nothing came to
her mind but a light-blasted image of a human fetus. Without context, that
image made no sense, but it was creepy as hell. Shaking off the goosebumps, she
forced herself back to the present, and back into the airlock.

It was dimly
lit with the emergency lighting, darker than it had been then. Wraith pushed at
the door, expecting it to swing open, but it was locked. A careful probe of the
locking mechanism showed her the hidden panel where the controls were.

She clicked the
lever over to ‘open’ and the hiss of gas equalizing pressure sounded through
the claustrophobic room. It should
have been filling with sharp medicinal air, but instead she smelled dusty fish
mushrooms again.

“What the hell
is going on?” Nadia asked behind her.

“Shh.” Raising
her plaster, Wraith watched as the pressure equalized and the locks thudded
open.

She motioned
for Nadia to open the door and then get back. When she had done so, Wraith
nudged the door open with her foot and went through fast.

A white
corridor, empty when the lights clicked on. It seemed to run into the distance
forever. If she had discovered a corridor to Hell, she wouldn’t have expected
it to look more ominous.

Still, they had
no choice but to search it.

The smell was
stronger here. The first several
rooms they looked into were empty and dead, as everything else had been, but
there were more of the sticky water stains on the floors. These were the labs
Wraith remembered, but empty now of even a clue to their previous contents.
Certainly she found no fetuses there.

As they moved
further from the elevator, the silence was broken by a quiet shush-slush, shush-slush overlaid by
random bubbling gurgles. Curiosity pushed her to move faster, but Wraith forced
herself to explore all of the rooms between the elevator and whatever was
making those noises.

They finally
reached the room behind the empty main labs, and the plasticoncrete floor
changed to metal grating at the door. This room was the source of the sounds.
Wraith hardly registered the change in tone of her footfalls from thud to clink, because the room was gigantic, and not remotely empty.

Even in the dim
yellow light, she could see identical shapes lined up in rows, almost seeming
to disappear into the distance. This room wasn’t like the warehouse upstairs;
its ceiling was probably only twelve feet high, and seemed a lot lower because
the room was so long and wide.

The shapes it
held were roughly cylindrical, spaced evenly, and with the hoses or cords snaking
out of their tops, reached almost to the ceiling. They were made of what looked
like actual real metal, rarer than fossuel, with identical smooth outer skins
and those puzzling collections of cords at their tops. Each one quietly slushed to itself in a rhythmic song
that merged together like the whispering of a crowd of people in the huge
underground room.

Nothing moved.
Warily, Wraith stepped closer to the nearest tank. The dim lighting was enough
for her eyes to pick up even fine detail, but there was some kind of film or
dust coating the surface and blocking her view of what they held. She scrubbed
a spot clear on the trueplastic window of the nearest tank, pulled a gun torch
out of her pocket, and clipped it to her plaster with a solid click. When she
aimed again at the tank, she heard Nadia’s sharp gasp.

Her own breath
seemed to have gone away on vacation. Tahiti, perhaps, or Maui. Something
tropical, to combat the vicious chill that had settled into her lungs in its
place.

Finally, she
unlocked her throat. “Rogue, you need to get down here right now.”

He didn’t
mention her lapse in using his name rather than his code. “What did you find?”

“Now, Rogue.”

“Copy. We’ve
just got holding cells here. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Forcing her
mind to record details regardless of its shock, Wraith touched the tank’s
smooth black surface. A touchscreen and several odd dials sprouted to the left
of the window, along with a readout screen showing vital statistics which she
now understood.

Swallowing
hard, she looked again through the clear trueplastic window. Inside, floating
serenely in the kind of fluid which had almost certainly left the smelly, tacky
stains they had found on the floors both here and above, was Sin.

Hope you
enjoyed the excerpt! If you want
to learn more, you can check it out on the books page. Or feel free to click over to the next
spot on the tour below, or head back to the link list. Thanks for stopping by!